A very rare, very strange illustrated fairy tale from the late 1970s, illustrated by one of the fantasy and gaming world's icons.

Henry Wolff’s text draws on the bones of folklore, giving you a prince, a woodcutter, and the sense of a quest or trial, but the real force of the book is the visual world John Blanche builds around it: spectral forests, ruined architectures, haunted interiors, and figures that look half-medieval, half-nightmare. Less a clean children’s fable than a dark fantasy picture-book for older readers, where the atmosphere keeps thickening around the narrative.

Blanche is the real draw here. Long before his work became inseparable from Games Workshop’s grim, gothic visual language expressed in Warhammer and the like, he was already making ornate, diseased, medievalist, and unhinged images like these. For Blanche collectors, this sits in that early, harder-to-find zone alongside his other non-GW illustration work. Beaut of a book.

Paper Tiger paperback edition, 1979, by Henry Wolff with illustrations throughout by John Blanche. Scarce early Blanche title; light general wear and toning visible, but a solid, presentable copy with the illustrations clean and intact.